A blog focused on the link between health and consciousness and the powerful effect of healthy thoughts

Wearable Health

About this blog

By Ingrid Peschke

Ingrid Peschke writes regularly about the relationship between consciousness, spirituality and health. For the last 10 years she worked in publishing as a print/digital editor in Boston for a weekly magazine. She is a Christian Science practitioner
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Ingrid Peschke writes regularly about the relationship between consciousness, spirituality and health. For the last 10 years she worked in publishing as a print/digital editor in Boston for a weekly magazine. She is a Christian Science practitioner and also the media and legislative liaison for Christian Science in Massachusetts. Follow her on Twitter @IMPeschke and find her articles on The Huffington Post.

Is monitoring your health just a bracelet away? It’s a trend that’s catching on to people’s wrists across the country. Similar to a trendy watch, these bands–like the Basis–monitor your sleep, heart rate, calories burned, body temperature, etc. With a USB or Bluetooth the gadgets send data right to your computer or smart phone, so you can monitor and track your stats.

A friend of mine got a sleek white one as a gift and recently showed me how it worked. As an active mom, she was excited to more accurately know how many stairs she’s climbed in a day or how many calories she’s burned.

“[The app] is helping people recognize the connection between our mind, our body, and our soul. Because if you just take care of your physical health it’s not going to be enough…If you just take care of what you eat and how much exercise you get,” she continued, “and you don’t deal with your anxiety, your depression, your stress, you’re still not really dealing with your whole being, and all these other factors are going to affect your health.”

More and more people agree that considering the healthy state of our thoughts is no longer an option but a must in determining a person’s overall health.

John Pavley, CTO at Huff Post, speculates that with enough wearable gadgets and smart appliances in our homes “a new system emerges: A ‘connected healthcare management system’ that could save millions of lives and millions of dollars in medical costs.”

Everyone is trying to come up with a way to rethink our current costly and largely ineffective American healthcare system. A good place to start is this trend of turning away from an “out there” system, with over-reliance on doctors and machines, to a personalized system where people can feel more independently accountable for their health.

The good news is this emphasis on cost-savings and positive results has more people looking to the one place that may have been largely ignored or left out in the past: the effect of an individual’s thinking. Isn’t that where it all starts? The decisions one makes to be angry or not (i.e. preventing stress); the decisions one makes to overeat or not (i.e. preventing obesity); the decisions one makes to be grateful and happy (i.e. preventing forms of depression).

But how do we go about achieving healthy thoughts? Probably not just with another gadget. For some it’s about finding time to center one’s thoughts through a daily habit of prayer or mindfulness.

“The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking,” said Albert Einstein. For years I’ve begun my morning with prayer as a way of changing unhealthy thoughts and habits by centering my thoughts on good. The Psalmist said, “How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with thee.”

I can monitor my health in innovative and practical ways when I begin each day with quiet contemplation and prayer. I'm better able to focus on the grace and peace that defies stress, keeps me balanced, joyous and fearless. That’s a healthy choice anyone can make.